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Banu Bargu

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Banu Bargu is Associate Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research. Banu Bargu’s main area of specialization is political theory, especially modern and contemporary political thought, with a thematic focus on theories of sovereignty, resistance, and biopolitics. Her research interests are situated at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and anthropology, with a regional focus on the Middle East (especially Turkey). In her research and teaching, she draws upon the traditions of continental and critical theory to address salient political issues and contemporary resistance practices. Her work engages with thinkers such as Machiavelli, Marx, Stirner, Schmitt, Foucault, and Althusser around questions related to the body, violence, sacrifice, martyrdom, ideology, and aesthetics. She is interested in bringing together political theorization with empirical, ethnographic, and historical research, relying on methods that are transdisciplinary and hybrid.

Professor Bargu is the author of Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia UP, 2014), which received APSA's 2015 First Book Award given by the Foundations of Political Theory section and was named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2015 by CHOICE. She is currently working on two book-length projects. The first is a volume on corporeal counter-politics, analyzing exemplary instances involving the use of the body in political struggles. The second project is a manuscript on Louis Althusser’s political thought and his rethinking of the materialist tradition, especially in light of the posthumous publication of Althusser’s work on the aleatory.

Degrees Held:

PhD 2008, Cornell University

Recent Publications:

Book

Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons(New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 512 pp.
- Recipient of the Best First Book Award, American Political Science Association (Foundations of Political Theory Section), 2015
- Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2015

“Stasiology: Political Theology and the Figure of the Sacrificial Enemy,” in After Secular Law, edited by Winnifred Sullivan, Robert Yelle and Mateo Taussig-Rubbo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 140-159.

“Foucault and Iran,” SCTIW Review Book Symposium on Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi’s Foucault in Iran, SCTIW Review: Journal of the Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World (March 21, 2017): 1-7.

“Forging Life into a Weapon,” in the dossier “Thinking Through Violence: An Interdisciplinary Conversation,” edited by Elena Bellina, J. Martin Daughtry, Crystal Parikh and Arvind Rajagopal, Periscope: Social Text, May 2011.